ruins etc. we decided to do something a little different and joined some acquaintances on a day trip to a mud volcano. With visions of driving up into the hills to enjoy some kind of exotic “mud spa”, with massage beds, clean change-rooms, and hot showers we cheerfully set off with shampoo and crème rinse in hand.To our great surprise, the “volcano” looked more like a giant ant hill, and the “change-rooms” consisted of a 3x3 ft area, partially screened off from the tiny kitchen of a very rustic, dirt-floor restaurant. To be fair, if a person was really insistent about maintaining their privacy, there was a second option to use either one of the two outhouses.
Then, once we climbed to the top of the 75 foot tall “anthill”, we realized that there were over 25 people from a couple of buses there and the area of the mud hole was definitely no more than 10x10 ft! With 6 people already in the mud, plus 2 “masseuses”, the entire idea was looking less appealing by the minute (I think the total was around 35 people in this wonderfully hygienic
space). But we, and the rest of our group, eventually slid in and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.For any males that may be reading this section, Andrea is now going to describe an incident that may result in a pretty undesirable visual, so I recommend that you skip the next couple of paragraphs to try and prevent future nightmares. If you choice to ignore my suggestions, you do so at your own risk.
OK ladies, here we go. First, let me tell you that quite unwisely, I chose to pack only one bathing suit on our little South American adventure and in further error, it happened to be a 2 piece bathing suit. In all fairness, it is a very modest 2 piece, definitely no bikini. Perhaps even suggesting that I could wear a bikini would be an oxymoron? After-all, would the amount of fabric that it would take to cover even just my private parts not automatically exclude it from the “bikini” category?
Sorry, I digress, back to the story at hand. OK, after 45 minutes of soaking in this mud bath, it was time to get out, and “getting out” required climbing up a very slippery 4 rung ladder (obviously covered in mud). Now, most of you have probably experienced being at the beach and being thrown around in waves that were a little stronger than you had expected. What happened after you had been plunged under the water and bounced on the sandy bottom and then suddenly found your bearings and stood
up? For sure the bottom of your bathing suit and depending on how much you were tossed around, perhaps the top also, was riding significantly lower thanks to a few pounds of sand right?OK, now envision this. Here I am, after 45 minutes in the mud, trying to climb up this slippery ladder wearing an old, two piece bathing suit - that just happens to be a little big to begin with. .. Yup, no matter how hard I tried to envision myself looking like the little girl from the old Coppertone commercial (when the cute little dog pulls down the bottom of her bathing suit) I knew that the real truth was that I could easily be the poster girl for a new Maxine cartoon and there wasn’t a damn thing that I could do about it at that moment…
Then came the time to clean ourselves off, rather than a nice strong shower where we cold shampoo ourselves silly, we had a shallow, slow moving, muddy river to “dip” into. Although Ian proclaims that he would have preferred to “shower”, he certainly didn’t look too hard-done by when the young woman that was “rinsing him off” told him to take of his bathing suit so she could rinse it out as well. :0)
All in all, it was a lot of fun and provided a great opportunity to laugh at ourselves but I expect that we will be digging mud out of our ears for days to come.
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